Harresh Mehta : How a 2011 SBI loan, a Dadar tower, a “witness” who became an accused, and a 12-year investigation still have not produced a conviction

There is a particular kind of Mumbai scandal that does not explode. It ferments. It sits in a bank file, then a CBI file, then a court diary, then a stock-exchange disclosure, then a Hindi recap published years after the handcuffs came off. The Patrika report of 20 September 2026 is that last artefact: a 2026 retelling of a 20 May 2023 arrest in a fraud whose loan papers were signed in 2011.

That lag is not a footnote. It is the story.

The public was told that Harresh Navnitrai Mehta — also spelled Hareesh and Harish in the same press pack — chairman of Rohan Developers / Rohan Lifescapes, a South Mumbai redeveloper of old buildings into premium stock, had been picked up by CBI’s Economic Offences Wing in an “over two-decade-old” ₹280 crore State Bank of India loan fraud. He was produced in court, held in police custody until 24 May 2023, refused further CBI remand because “not cooperating / we want to confront other accused” was not enough, parked in judicial custody, and then, within weeks, walked out on a ₹5 lakh personal bond and surety from the special CBI court at Thane. Judge Amit Shete told him to report to CBI every Monday and Tuesday and not to touch the evidence.

That is the entire physical consequence, so far, for the man whose name now headlines the recap. No reported conviction. No reported sentence. A bail order that even noted the loan could be treated as “secured.”

If that sounds like a system that growls at builders and then offers them tea, that is because, on the public record, that is what happened.

The bank’s money, the tower’s floors, the missing sale deed

Strip the adjectives. Keep the dates and the rupees.

CBI’s case, as reported by The Indian Express and The Times of India, is that SBI sanctioned facilities to Rajput Retail Ltd (RRL) — later Shreem Corporation — on the strength of documents the agency calls fabricated. One slab of that lending was a term loan of about ₹139 crore to buy the 14th and 16th floors and part of the 15th floor of The Ruby, Dadar, plus a short-term loan of about ₹16 crore. About ₹155 crore landed in the account of The Ruby Mills Ltd on 10 February 2012.

A letter of intent among Ajay Gupta of RRL, Bharat Shah of Ruby Mills and Mehta for those floors is dated 20 February 2012 — ten days after the money had already arrived. CBI treats that sequence as the opposite of how a genuine property purchase is supposed to work.

Two days before the money hit Ruby, on 8 February 2012, Rohan Developers through Mehta is alleged to have asked Ruby Mills for an inter-corporate deposit of ₹50 crore for six months at 10 per cent. CBI’s phrase for that ICD is not “working-capital courtesy between two South Mumbai houses.” It is Mehta’s share of the crime proceeds. The agency says the ₹50 crore was used for personal purposes and as loans and advances into an associate company.

The 2017 first-wave reporting is even cruder. CBI had already arrested an SBI official, Ruby Mills director Bharat Shah and others. The allegation then: the Guptas took SBI money on inflated valuations of properties at Powai and Tarapur; part of the cash was meant for three commercial floors in Ruby Tower; the bank issued demand drafts; Shah took them; about ₹54 crore went back to the Guptas; no sale deed was executed; Shah was accused of using the remaining ₹101 crore. SBI relationship manager V.N. Kadam was named for processing the file without the diligence a public bank owes depositors.

Read that again slowly. A public-sector bank is said to have financed floors that, on the prosecution story, were never conveyed. A listed mill company is said to have held ₹155 crore of that money. A builder who was first listed as a witness in the 2018 chargesheet is, five years later, arrested as a conspirator who skimmed ₹50 crore dressed as a loan. And the borrower company is now in liquidation.

That is not a “dispute over delayed paperwork.” That is, if the agencies are right, a closed loop in which SBI was the ATM and The Ruby was the prop.

The witness who became the accused

The most inconvenient fact for anyone still selling the “CBI has closed the circle” line is this: Mehta was a witness in the 2018 chargesheet.

CBI registered the SBI complaint in 2016. In 2018 it chargesheeted RRL/Shreem, Vijay Gupta, Ajay Gupta, V.N. Kadam and two others. Bharat Shah had been arrested around 2017 and released on bail; he was not in that first chargesheet. Mehta’s name sat on the witness list. Then the agency “continued investigation,” searched Rohan and Ruby premises, and in May 2023 flipped the witness into an accused.

Mehta’s bail petition called the arrest illegal, uncalled for and without legal or factual justification. He said SBI had not named him in the FIR. He said the 2016–18 investigation had not found his role. A Rohan group representative told ET Realty that Rohan and Ruby Mills were victims of fraud by Rajput Retail and the Guptas, and that once a supplementary chargesheet was filed Mehta would move to exonerate himself.

The Thane court did not wait for that sermon. It noted that Shah had already deposited ₹22.5 crore and was ready to put in ₹78.5 crore more — “thus the entire term loan amount can be said to be secured” — and that the crime was registered in 2016 and Mehta had cooperated “during these years.” Bail followed.

Translation, without the judicial courtesy: a 2011–12 loan file, a 2016 FIR, a 2018 chargesheet that treated the builder as a spectator, a 2023 arrest, and a court that looked at the cash already circling back to the insolvency and decided jail was optional.

If you are a salaried borrower who missed three EMIs, savour that standard of “cooperation.”

₹280 crore was the trailer. ₹764.44 crore is the feature.

The Patrika headline is stingy. The RRL/Ruby slice is the part that photographs well — a Dadar tower, a South Mumbai builder, a round number. The Enforcement Directorate’s later case treats that slice as one room in a much larger house.

ED, working off CBI and Mumbai EOW FIRs against six Vindhyavasini group companies, alleges that Vijay R. Gupta and Ajay R. Gupta took SBI credit on forged and inflated MoUs, forged TEV reports and inflated valuations; that the facilities turned NPA in 2013; and that the loss to SBI’s Eastern Express Highway branch in Thane is about ₹764.44 crore. ED’s published account: 40-plus / 50-plus shell entities, in one version 57 shells and 117 bank accounts, more than ₹42 crore withdrawn in cash, properties bought in own names, family names and alleged benami holdings, and a claimed ₹59 lakh bribe to then SBI relationship manager Vishwas / V.N. Kadam.

Vijay Gupta was arrested under PMLA on 26 March 2025, sent to ED custody, then judicial custody. In July 2025 a special PMLA court refused bail, calling him, on ED’s plea, a habitual economic offender and holding that predicate-offence custody does not automatically unlock PMLA bail. In May 2025 ED provisionally attached movable and immovable assets worth ₹81.88 crore. Against an alleged ₹764.44 crore hole, that attachment is a little over 10 per cent.

Do the arithmetic the bank’s shareholders cannot avoid. If the agency’s own quantum is right, more than ₹680 crore of the alleged proceeds is still outside that attachment order. Twelve years after the NPA stamp, the recovery story is a percentage, not a closing.

Ruby Mills paid ₹101 crore — and still could not walk out of PMLA

Here the record gets even less flattering to the idea that “civil settlement cleanses a criminal file.”

Ruby Mills’ own exchange filings say the company voluntarily paid ₹101 crore to the resolution professional of Shreem (formerly RRL) even though it “had not received any loan disbursement and [was] not at fault.” After a Supreme Court intervention sent the matter back to NCLT Mumbai, the tribunal directed the deposit. By 22 December 2023, ₹78.5-odd crore from Ruby plus ₹22.5 crore sitting in an SBI no-lien account had reached the RP. SBI confirmed receipt to investigators. The company petition and Ruby’s interlocutory application were disposed of.

That is a listed company writing a nine-figure cheque to extinguish a transaction it still calls incomplete and civil.

It did not end the criminal overlay. CBI filed a supplementary chargesheet; Thane sessions court summoned Ruby Mills and Bharat M. Shah. ED filed a PMLA prosecution complaint naming the company and its managing director. In November 2025, a Mumbai special PMLA court refused to discharge Shah and Ruby Mills from the money-laundering case tied to the six SBI-default FIRs. ED’s theory remains that Shah received ₹155 crore from RRL for two-and-a-half floors of The Ruby and parked funds in short-term deposits earning interest. The court was not interested in the “six FIRs cannot sit in one PMLA complaint” argument.

So the mill company paid the ₹101 crore, told the market it was not the borrower, and still sits inside a laundering prosecution. The builder who took the alleged ₹50 crore ICD is on CBI bail from 2023. The Gupta who, on ED’s case, built the shell farm is in PMLA custody from 2025. Same money trail. Three speeds of consequence.

The borrower is now a liquidation file

RRL became Shreem. SBI dragged it into IBC under Section 7 on 22 September 2021. SBI holds about 95.63 per cent of CoC voting share. In May 2026, NCLT ordered liquidation after the committee rejected every resolution plan. Older reporting put Shreem’s own exposure near ₹283 crore — the number that sits next to the “₹280 crore fraud” headline.

Liquidation is what a bank does when the story of “we will regularise the account” has died. It is also what happens when a 2011 loan, a 2013 NPA and a 2016 CBI FIR are allowed to age into a 2026 winding-up order while the criminal trial still crawls.

Public money went in. A tower’s floors were the narrative. The corporate debtor is being sold for scrap. That is the commercial epitaph.

The same name, other police stations

A serious piece does not pretend that one CBI file is a moral biography. It also does not pretend the rest of the clippings are invisible.

Aaram / Aram, Girgaum Chowpatty (2020 EOW). Sessions court on 24 December 2020 refused Mehta anticipatory bail. The FIR said Rohan Lifespace was to rebuild Aaram Guest House as a 22-storey luxury tower by 2013. The Shah brothers said they booked in 2009–10 and paid ₹8.16 crore. The judge recorded that the project had not been carried out, that the amount was not returned, and that there was, prima facie, intent to cheat “since the inception.” Mehta told The Times of India the matter had been “amicably settled.” Settlement is not acquittal. It is the Mumbai speciality in which a criminal allegation is converted into a cheque and a press line.

Shiv Tapi / Gamdevi, 2025. Gamdevi police registered an FIR against Rohan Lifescapes, associate Goodwill Properties, and directors including Harresh Mehta, on a complaint that a mid-2000s MHADA redevelopment near Mani Bhavan used the FSI of five plots, sold flats on the open market, and did not rehabilitate all original occupants or surrender MHADA surplus. A May 2024 MHADA vigilance note, as reported, accused the developer of manufacturing a combined 70 per cent consent by merging separate plots. Sections invoked included BNS 318(4), 316(2), 316(5) and 3(5). Senior PI Vishwanath Kolekar said the case was filed months earlier and that no arrests had followed because anticipatory bail had been granted.

7 Hughes, NCLT, 6 February 2025. Homebuyers of Rohan Developers’ “7 Hughes” project got project-specific CIRP admitted on a claimed financial debt of about ₹82.23 crore, default dated 30 December 2023. That is not a CBI conviction. It is an insolvency court saying, on a Section 7 record, that a Rohan project company defaulted to allottees hard enough to cross the IBC threshold.

None of these files proves the SBI case. Together they destroy the brochure. The brochure sells “urban renewal,” “quality,” “value.” The public docket sells delayed towers, unpaid allottees, a vigilance note on consent arithmetic, and a bank-loan narrative in which floors were paid for and not conveyed.

What the calendar actually accuses

Forget the adjectives. Charge the clock.

From first disbursement to liquidation: about fifteen years.
From FIR to Mehta’s arrest: seven years.
From Mehta’s arrest to a reported conviction: none.
From alleged ₹764.44 crore loss to ED attachment: ₹81.88 crore.

That is not an investigation. That is a relay race in which every agency hands the baton to the next calendar.

The banker–builder convenience

Every large Indian bank fraud has the same supporting cast: a relationship manager who “did not apply his mind,” a valuation that discovered extra floors in the same building, an MoU that was worth whatever the sanction note needed it to be, and a promoter who discovered, after the money moved, that the sale deed could wait.

CBI named V.N. Kadam. ED’s later narration alleges a ₹59 lakh payment to the Thane relationship manager for pushing facilities. If that bribe allegation is proved, it is not a “lapse.” It is a price list. If it is not proved, the bank still has to explain how forged TEV reports and inflated valuations survived a public-sector credit committee and became an NPA stamp two years later.

SBI is not a neighbourhood cooperative. It is the country’s largest commercial bank. When its Thane branch is said to have financed floors that were not conveyed, steel mills on inflated MoUs, and a mall-and-commercial story that ended in shells and cash withdrawals, the embarrassment is institutional. The 2018 chargesheet against a bank officer was the minimum. The absence of a public, time-bound account of which sanctions were reopened, which officers were proceeded against departmentally, and how much of the ₹764.44 crore has actually returned to the bank, is the larger insult.

Depositors do not get a 12-year “further investigation.” They get an EMI.

Why the 2026 recap still stings

Patrika did not expose a new raid. It recirculated a 2023 arrest because the underlying rot never received a verdict loud enough to close the file. That is the tell. In a functioning system, a ₹280 crore public-bank allegation with a named builder, a named mill, a named borrower and a named officer would have been tried, acquitted or convicted before the borrower’s company went to liquidation. Instead the country gets a Hindi rewrite, a bail bond, a ₹101 crore “voluntary” deposit, an ₹81.88 crore attachment, and a PMLA court that will not even discharge the mill.

Rohan’s line — we were victims — is a serious defence and must be tested in trial, not in a press note. Ruby’s line — civil dispute, we paid ₹101 crore, we never took the SBI loan — is also a serious defence, and the PMLA court has so far refused to treat the cheque as a wipe. The Guptas’ line, whatever remains of it after ED remand and a refused bail, will have to survive shells, cash and NPA dates.

None of those defences is served by delay. Delay is how memory dies and documents yellow and witnesses retire. Delay is how a 2012 ICD becomes a 2023 arrest becomes a 2026 recap becomes, if nobody is watching, a 2030 footnote.

What enforcement still owes the public

This file does not need another press release. It needs a clock.

CBI should say, on record, whether the supplementary chargesheet against Mehta, Shah and Ruby has been taken to charge, whether Kadam and the “two others” from 2018 have been tried, and why a man first cited as a witness needed a dawn arrest in 2023 if the money trail was already on paper in 2012.

ED should say how much of the ₹764.44 crore has been identified as proceeds of crime, how much of the ₹81.88 crore attachment has been confirmed, and why the attachment is a tenth of the alleged hole.

SBI should put in the public domain the recovery, write-off and sacrifice figures on the Vindhyavasini / RRL / Shreem accounts, and the departmental action against every officer who signed the 2011–13 sanctions.

The special courts at Thane and Mumbai should stop treating 2011 paper as a leisure activity. Day-to-day trial. No adjournment for “voluminous documents” that have had fourteen years to be paginated.

Mumbai Police / EOW, on the Shiv Tapi and Aaram files, should either file chargesheets that can survive scrutiny or close the cases. Anticipatory bail is not a business model.

If the agencies are right, a public bank was used as a tap, a Dadar tower was used as a stage set, and a ₹50 crore “loan” was used as a divider of spoils. If they are wrong, three business houses have been dragged through a decade of stigma on a theory that could not be proved. Either conclusion is a public interest. The present condition — allegation without verdict — is only a convenience.

Disclaimer

All references in this article to cheating, conspiracy, forgery, bribery, diversion of loans, money laundering, breach of trust or related offences are allegations made in FIRs, chargesheets, ED complaints, court pleadings and contemporaneous news reports. They are not findings of guilt.

As of the last verified public reporting used for this piece (through September 2026):

• Harresh / Hareesh Navnitrai Mehta has not been convicted by any court of law in the CBI–SBI ₹280 crore loan-fraud case. He was arrested on 20 May 2023 and granted bail by the special CBI court, Thane, in June 2023. He has denied the allegations and his company has called itself a victim of the Guptas’ fraud. Other police and NCLT matters cited above are separate proceedings; none of them, on the public record reviewed here, is a criminal conviction of Mehta in the SBI case.
• Bharat M. Shah and The Ruby Mills Ltd have not been convicted in this matter. They contest the criminal and PMLA cases and point to the ₹101 crore paid to Shreem’s resolution professional.
• Vijay R. Gupta, Ajay R. Gupta, V.N. / Vishwas Kadam and other named persons remain, unless a later unreported judgment exists, accused persons. Gupta’s 2025 ED arrest and the refusal of PMLA bail are custody orders, not convictions.
• Insolvency orders against Shreem Corporation and the project-specific CIRP against Rohan Developers’ “7 Hughes” are civil-commercial processes under the IBC. They are not criminal verdicts.

Allegation is not proof. Bail is not innocence. Attachment is not confiscation. A newspaper recap is not a judgment.

The demand that follows from that disclaimer is not softness. It is the opposite. If the facts are as the agencies plead them, the country has waited long enough. Investigate tighter. Charge cleaner. Try faster. Recover more than a tenth. And stop asking the public to treat a fifteen-year-old bank file as breaking news.